Amazing that this spacecraft has been operating for nearly half a century.
May the same be true of my vibe coded b2b SaaSes.
NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#22I had the honor and pleasure to take a class from the venerable professor, JPL director, and Voyager project scientist Ed Stone at Caltech in 2018. He excitedly told us a "secret" on November 1st that Voyager 2 had reached interstellar space, and he showed us the actual data proving it. But we had to keep it a secret until the press release that Monday, November 5. It was a special moment to see his passion for the project almost 50 years in, and felt incredibly special to hear it directly from him. RIP professor.
Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#23Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#24Imagine deploying your bug fix and having to wait two days to find out if it worked!
An old timer once told me about how he would read his printouts, make new punch cards, send them over to the main office, someone would put the new cards into the system the next morning, and then read the printouts on the day after that to see if his code worked or not.
This. Except worse, during busy days you had to stand on line for an hour or more for a turn on the machines. I believe the skill of debugging by mentally stepping through a program's execution came from such long run times, a useful skill many younger programmers lack.
Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#25Can we send faster better equipped craft to move past solar system in a year or two ?
Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#26Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#27Imagine deploying your bug fix and having to wait two days to find out if it worked!
I once left a company after deploying a fix to solve a rare crash due to a data race and only figured out if it worked after I had started the new job by poking my old coworkers about it.
Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#28Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#29Can we send faster better equipped craft to move past solar system in a year or two ?
The planetary alignment that allowed the Voyager probes to move so fast only occurs every 175 years. Even with this advantage it took them 12 years to get to Neptune. So the short answer is no.
Re: NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hope not to see that day
Are you planning on dying before 2036? That's one estimate for when they'll run out of power.
With little what I know of Voyager, the beautiful machine has broke all previous estimates. And thus hoping it will last until we have another such machine overtake the distance before this one goes into total shutdown